Hello everyone,
The build was updated last night so check it out when you have time. A lot of improvements were made to the water chemistry simulation as well as to the art style of the algae And we threw in a few rendering performance improvements for good measure.
As algae levels increase a new algae texture appears on the surface of objects in addition to the plant like tufts that we added last week. You can see in this image that the airstone objects do not get covered in algae. Our reasoning for this is that they are quite important objects that need to be easily identified by players and because they blast gas bubbles our from their surface it does not allow algae to settle and grow.
The next step for algae is to add it back into the materials for the substrate.
Power can now be consumed by items that need it in order to function. Airstones are such items. They will not produce CO2 or Oxygen unless there is sufficient power. For now the only way to produce power is to connect one or more power generators to your aquarium's plumbing system.
OLD UI:
NEW UI:
The airstones selection UI has been updated to better reflect how it changes the water chemistry and power. Hopefully this makes it very clear and simple for players to tweak gas output without feeling unsure of the outcome of such tweaks. If you compare the new UI with the old one. It is very easy to see why we needed to change it.
Similar changes have also been made to the Selection UIs of all plumbing objects. More numbers are on display to make things clear.
The usual pile of bug fixes and tweaks have been made that make everything work much better overall. We focused a lot this week on reducing the complexity of shaders for all decorations (rocks, wood, fossils, etc). There are a lot less lighting calculations happening per pixel which drastically reduces the time your graphics processor needs to render things per frame. Shadow performance has also been improved. Hopefully these changes also reduce some shadow flickering at lower shadow resolutions. However we are far from satisfied with shadows so expect them to improve over time.
We have also been putting a lot of work into things that we are still not ready to show yet. Regarding the career mode. It is shaping up to be very interesting but there is a lot of text to write on top of planning. We are also working hard on the next iteration of the art style for fish, decorations and plants. Soon when we are satisfied we will show you progress.
As you can imagine we are working flat out at the moment. There are so many improvements that are being made but also so many still to be made that overall it seems progress is a little slow even though we get a lot done in the space of 1 week. But we are focused and highly motivated to get this all done so keep checking back at these posts every week to see all the progress made.
Have a great weekend,
The Fishery Team